Fostering Reading Culture in School...and Home School?

PERSONAL PRACTICES: how have I been fostering a reading culture in my school?  What worked and what didn't work?

I love to read.  In fact, I mostly like to read children's picture books.  My kids are 6 and 4 yrs and going to the library to get piles and piles of books are a regular activity.  At the beginning of kindergarten, the Fraser Valley Regional Library has a "100 Books to Read In Kindergarten" list.  I created a visual list of these 100 books and we worked on reading those books and checking them off over the course of my son's kindergarten year!  I love programs like that.  And, thank goodness for the kids' library cards, as we are often late in returning our books!  When you take out your maximum number of books (60) and then go a couple days overdue, the fines add up fast!  Haha.  But when my son comes home from school and talks about his new interest in a topic, we immediately head out to our public library and find books about that subject!  What can we learn about it?  I love FVRL. 

As a classroom teacher, my enthusiastic love of reading translated into an awesome classroom library (which is sadly stored in boxes in my crawlspace currently...).  I used the Fountas & Pinnell leveling system to level all the books on my classroom bookshelf and then was regularly assessing my students using Reading A - Z tools (which, at the time, were the same lettered leveling as F&P but now are slightly different).  This way, I could ensure that kids were reading at a 95% accuracy rate in their silent reading time and moving up as their abilities improved.  Kids would complete a reading response page about their book and I had a rotating bulletin board where these would get posted so that other kids in the classroom could see what their peers were reading and perhaps get suggestions for their next novel.  Now that I reflect back on this, instead of having kids complete a reading response journal in their notebook or a graphic organizer page, wouldn't it have been great to have something online to share about their reading with students from other schools?  

As you may have figured out from my previous posts, I currently work with families who home school and have been doing this for the past four years.  Many of my personal and classroom practices are still in use. I ask them how often they go to their public library (which is surprisingly very low!).  I assess their child's reading level using Reading A - Z.  I set up their child (if he is in K - gr. 3) with a RAZ Kids online reading account (where I can track their books, listen to them read aloud, and see their comprehension quiz scores).  I suggest curriculum that is literature based (like Moving Beyond the Page) though not everyone takes me up on it!  :)  

Because the public library is essentially our "school library" for homeschoolers, I have tried some varying ways to get my families there.  One year, I started an Author of the Month program that I set up for all my K - gr. 3 students.  I chose an author for each month then curated a huge list of activities based on specific books from that month's author which parents could incorporate into their LA, math, science, socials, etc.  The plan was to have parents request as many books from FVRL online for these authors in advance then complete activities throughout the month.  I even set up a blog where moms could post about the activities they were doing which started out strong with a few moms but fizzled out within a few months.  While I loved creating this program, I found it to be a ton of work to keep up with and the level of interested parents was always varying each month.  I found that parents did not necessarily do the pre-work of ordering books.  Parents who did, often found that they were not getting all the books that they wanted in time.  This was why I have not yet continued this program but would like to in the future.  In reflection, I'd need to dedicate more time to keeping the blog up and running.  It would be awesome to figure out a way to have the kids connecting about the books they're reading as well.  

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE: What Else Can I Be Doing/How Can I Improve?  

Twice, above, I mentioned that it would have been great for students to be able to connect directly about the books they are reading.  During one of our Tuesday night Google hangouts, I was introduced to Symbaloo.  This looks like something that I plan to use right away in my practice to connect homeschoolers together to talk about their books.  I've started a "Kids Books" Symbaloo that link the cover picture (that a child as young as kindergarten could locate on his own) to a VoiceThread where they can talk about the book. My students are familiar with VoiceThread because they send work samples and talk about their work with me using this program. I'm not yet using the Symbaloo just yet so I was just practicing but here's the first stage: 



I found an article by Kim Manzer about providing support to struggling readers using technology and found a couple good ideas there but many of the sites that she mentions are no longer up and running (such as OWL and Reading Tutor).  In searching one of the resources she suggests, PictoPal, I discovered another research article about this site, however, the these articles are from 2007/8 and this program also does not seem to be in service.  This can be a problem with articles about technology!  

But I actually had to do some research on what a "reading culture" really is.  I think I've been writing about individual reading tools but how do I "incite a reading cultural boom"?  I read some very interesting articles by National Literacy Trust in the UK about a 2 year plan for starting a whole school reading culture and they describe practices such as taking a whole-school reading audit, surveying pupils about their reading behaviour, and creating an action plan.  Of course, they want you to pay them to help you do these things and use their tools but for a school in need of a change, it might be worth it.  However, within that article, I found a study about children's reading habits and preferences which was very interesting and could be used in more depth.  I wonder if it translates well to Canadian children as it was written based on children in England and is from 2005.  

However, to relate this topic to my personal practices, is it possible to create a reading culture among homeschoolers?  I feel as though I can introduce parents to my personal enthusiasm, my tools and practices, but it's up to them to instill a love of reading into their own children.  My job would be to introduce parents to this concept.  Here's a great blog post that I could share with parents about establishing a reading culture at home.  The author describes practices such as building your home library, establishing a library shelf where the books related to your current topics are displayed, and engaging in activities related to books.  I can help this area!  This is what I was trying to do when I started my author studies and hopefully, what I will continue to do through my current practices and my introduction of Symbaloo/VoiceThread to my families.  A great book that I recently discovered is called Story Stretchers: Activities to Expland Children's Favourite Books which I will use to develop some more author studies and suggest to families to purchase.  I also found a couple other great-looking websites that I thought I could research more to improve reading cultures in individual homes.

In my searches for the websites in Manzer's article, I also stumbled upon Awesome Stories.  Has anyone used this before?  I've signed up for my free 30 days.  Here's the premise:

AwesomeStories - Why it is so Awesome in Under 2 Minutes from AwesomeStories on Vimeo.
  
I think there's definitely possibilities for instilling a reading culture in home schools and the first steps are making parents aware of ways they can do this, getting them to their public libraries, and researching/using the tools myself so that I can share them with parents and help their children connect with OTHER children to talk about reading. 

Bibliography

Clark, Christina and Foster, Amelia.  "Children's and Young People's Reading Habits and Preferences: The who, what, where, why, and when". National Literacy Trust. National Literacy Trust, Dec. 2005.  Web. 12, Oct. 2015.  

Manzer, Kimberly. "Providing Support to Struggling Readers using Technology Assisted Reading". The Morning Watch: Educational & Social Analysis. Memorial University of Newfoundland, Fall 2013.  Vol. 41.  Web. 12, Oct. 2015.

National Literacy Trust. National Literacy Trust. n.p. 2015. Web. 10, Oct. 2015.

Raines, Shirley C. and Canady, Robert J. (1989) Story Stretchers: Activities to expand children's favorite books. Mt. Ranier, Maryland: Gryphon House

Woodie, Heather. (2014, Apr. 7) The Ultimate Guide to Establishing a Reading Culture in Your Home. Blog, She Wrote.  Retrieved from http://blogshewrote.org/2014/04/07/ultimate-guide-establishing-reading-culture-home/